Re:The Memory Models That Underlie Programming Languages
by kragen on Monday January 02, 2017 @04:12PM
(#13304582)
Thank you!
I think spreadsheets are kind of at a different level of abstraction from what I was talking about in this essay, a higher level. They're more like a data model or a programming paradigm than a memory model.
Re:The Memory Models That Underlie Programming Languages
by mhneu on Sunday January 01, 2017 @08:12PM
(#13298426)
The spreadsheet model is the SQL table model.
You should separate spreadsheet computation (which for these languages is written in the language) from the spreadsheet data.
Spreadsheets slightly generalize the SQL table by allowing cells to have varying data type, but without loss of generality any spreadsheet can be broken down into a set of SQL tables.
Re:The Memory Models That Underlie Programming Languages
by mathgenius on Sunday January 01, 2017 @08:04AM
(#13295609)
> array like in Fortran ... as a dependency graph
A spreadsheet is a bunch of pipes, arranged so that the endpoints live in an array.
One omission is the spreadsheet memory model. The spreadsheet can be argued as the multi-dimension array like in Fortran, but it's not. Both the data of primitive types and the computation declaration are stored in the table cells. Data dependency and computation are declared. Computation order is not specified and is run on the whole table as a dependency graph. It's kind of unique.